Emotional Michael Phelps Remembers Late Friend Dan Hicks: ‘He’s Always Helping Me’

This article was written by Karen Crouse and published on Sport & State, a new media company founded by Clay Travis that is built around sports, culture, original voices, and live conversation.
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Michael Phelps awoke Thursday to a message from the NBC Sports personality Mike Tirico to call him immediately. Phelps knew that whatever Tirico had to tell him couldn’t be good. But he never expected to hear that Dan Hicks, whose calls of Phelps’s Olympic races provided the soundtrack of his transcendent swimming career, had died at age 64.

“I was in shock,” Phelps said Thursday morning by phone. His voice cracked several times while remembering the broadcaster whom Phelps described as “an iconic figure in the sports world.”

Hicks, whose death of an acute illness was announced Thursday morning by his wife, HannahStorm, a longtime ESPN broadcaster, spent more than two decades as golf’s lead play-by-play announcer for NBC. Hicks also covered 16 Olympics for the network, including all five of Phelps’s Olympic appearances and all 23 of his gold-medal races.

The catalog of Hicks’s most illustrious calls include Tiger Woods sinking a putt to force a playoff at the 2008 U.S. Open (“Expect anything different?”) and the US 400-meter freestyle relay’s upset of France at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, which kept alive Phelps’s bid for a record eight gold medals in a single Olympics.

Dan Hicks’ call of the Michael Phelps-Jason Lezak relay from the 2008 Olympics will long live as one of the greatest ever.

Rest in peace to a legend. https://t.co/6CZfqmfsU1

— Mark Harris (@itismarkharris) November 12, 2026

Tirico told Phelps that Hicks used to marvel at his trajectory from weekend sports anchor at the NBC affiliate in his hometown of Tucson, Ariz., to the pinnacle of his profession. “I got to call Tiger Woods and Michael Phelps during the peak years of their careers,” Hicks used to say, according to Tirico.

Michael Phelps: Dan Hicks Was ‘Family’

Phelps, 41, met Hicks as a fifteen-year-old in 2000 when he made his first Olympic team, and over the next quarter-of-a-century they built a friendship, Phelps said, that was so enduring, Phelps described Hicks, Storm and their three daughters as “family.” He said, “I grew up with him. And I got super close to Hannah just with conversations we’ve had, whether it’s about mental health or whatever.”

From his first interview with Hicks, which Phelps joked was probably “full of ‘ums,’” Phelps developed under Hicks’s gentle guidance into a polished interview subject. Since his 2016 retirement, Phelps joined Hicks in the NBC booth as an insightful big-occasion commentary presence.

“He wanted me to be good so he was always helping me,” Phelps said. “He’d take my super nerdy geek-out swimming knowledge and help me so I could get my points across to the average viewer at home.”

In June of this year, Phelps said, he played a round of golf in a foursome that included Hicks. Afterward, they went to dinner to celebrate Phelps’s birthday and while out they called the former NBC personality Matt Lauer, waking him up to exchange good-natured trash talk. Also this year, Phelps recalled popping into the commentary booth to join Hicks to talk golf during the Waste Management Phoenix Open.

“All these memories are popping into my head this morning,” Phelps said.

When they weren’t running into each other at events, Phelps said he and Hicks exchanged random texts – anything from silly memes to random sports stats. “Just guys being guys,” he said.

Hicks Will Be Missed In LA 2028

Phelps said Hicks and his swimming broadcast wingman, Rowdy Gaines, were excited about reuniting for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles – the first Olympics on home soil in any capacity for Phelps.

“I looked forward to being in the booth with him in LA and the three of us getting back together,” he said.

In an interview two years ago on The Ole Gabbox podcast, Hicks noted that he had called all 28 of Phelps’s Olympic medal races as well as the two others in which he did not medal — his fifth place in the 200 butterfly in 2000 and his fourth place in the 400 IM final in 2012.

Hicks referenced Phelps when he said he had the privilege of being “in the right place, right time, right athletes, right moment.”

Still can’t believe this happened

— Dan Hicks (@DanHicksNBC) August 11, 2025

Hicks said, “To follow the arc of the career of a guy like Michael Phelps from start to finish as a gangly 15-year-old to what he did in his fifth Olympics in Rio and now joining us in the booth for his own cameos, you can’t write it up any better than that.”

Hicks, a Tucson native, graduated from Sabino High School in 1980 and from the University of Arizona in 1984. He started in radio and jumped from a job as a weekend sports anchor on KVOA, the NBC affiliate in Tucson, to CNN in 1989.

He was hired at NBC in 1992 and served as a tower announcer for the network’s golf coverage until being promoted to the lead play-by-play role in 2000. He worked swimming and skiing events at the Olympics and was the lead play-by-play voice for Notre Dame football during the 2024 season.

In her social media post announcing Hicks’s death, his wife Hannah Storm wrote, “Dan was truly one of a kind and, quite simply, the person everyone wanted to be around. He was endlessly kind, thoughtful and funny, and he made everyone feel like they mattered.”

https://t.co/8CK7OLXbZx

— Hannah Storm (@HannahStormESPN) November 12, 2026

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